Review: Amazon Halo Rise

I've been perpetually exhausted for years. Despite getting more hours of sleep than anyone I know, I can't remember the last time I felt refreshed. I used to wake up on my own around 8 am, ready for the day. Now, my alarm goes off 10 minutes before I need to be at my desk and it feels like I got woken up with a smack to the head.

I've blamed it on everything: a new medication, an old mattress, allergies, and sharing a bed with a partner. So I was intrigued when I heard about the Amazon Halo Rise, a sleep tracker and sunrise alarm. Could it pinpoint what's happening during the night? I gave it a spin for a few weeks. I found some information surprising, but it didn't change my life.

Both the Halo Rise and the second-generation Google Nest Hub work by using no-contact radar rather than a camera or a wearable. The last part is important, because my sensory overload would never allow something to sit on my wrist in bed. Sometimes the wrong T-shirt or my own hair is enough to send me into hysterics when I'm trying to sleep.

By emitting and receiving an ultralow-power radio signal, the Halo Rise detects motion and respiration, determining how long it takes you to fall asleep, how long you spend in each sleep stage, and the amount of time you spend awake after you've already fallen asleep for the night (these are called disturbances). Unlike the Nest Hub, there isn't a microphone. That will either make you happy—more privacy!—or disappointed, because that means you have less data on snoring or sleep talking. Regarding privacy, Amazon claims that all information is encrypted and you can delete your info from the app at any time; nevertheless, the company's track record is not spotless. 

In the morning, you get all that information in the accompanying app, including room temperature and humidity levels, and an overall sleep score. The biggest surprise for me was how long I'm actually asleep. Despite being in bed for somewhere around nine or 10 hours, I'm getting only seven or eight hours of sleep. Some nights, there was an obvious issue, like when I woke up two and a half hours after falling asleep and lay there for three hours and 23 minutes before finally dozing off again. Thankfully, that kind of night is rare, and most disturbances were a few minutes of petting my snuggly cats and then closing my eyes again.

Purchasing the $140 Rise gets you a six-month subscription to Halo, Amazon's health and wellness program. You don't have to subscribe for any of the sleep data, thankfully, but if you continue with the membership, you can also analyze your body fat and learn how your tone sounds to others (I'll pass on both), as well as get nutritional plans and recipes. 

Photograph: Amazon

Setting up the Halo Rise was easy and the app walks you through the specifics, like facing it toward your upper body at about an arm's length away. You don't want anything in between you and the Halo Rise. It didn't detect my sleeping husband on my other side. I do have cats who are very active at night, but luckily they rarely walk on the edge of the bed and instead opt to annoy both my husband and me at the same time by coming up through the middle. It didn't seem to affect my data, but it definitely could if your cats or children are more annoying than mine are. 

It's a sleep tracker first, but it's also a nice bedside lamp. With just a small arc of actual light, it gets really bright or really dim, depending on what you need. Pressing the smaller button on the top of the device starts a 30-minute sunset simulation for getting yourself ready to doze. The bigger button is the snooze or light control. I don't love the process of adjusting the light, since you hold down the button as it cycles through levels, and if you accidentally go too far in one direction you have to wait and cycle through it again. 

In the app you can set up either a sunrise or audio alarm, or use them both together. There is also a “smart alarm,” which can ring within 30 minutes of the set wake-up time if it detects you've entered the light sleep stage.

Because it's an Amazon device, you can use the Halo Rise with an Alexa device. Ask her to start or snooze an alarm or read out your sleep data (an Alexa with a screen will even show you your sleep graph, or hypnogram). This is also the only way to change the alarm sound to something other than one of the five very similar buzzer sounds in the Halo app. 

I wish there were more alarm options without having to connect Alexa, and I also wish the digital clock could be set to turn off in a dark room and turn back on in the morning like the Hatch Restore does. You can set it to automatically adjust to light levels, but there's still a faint light on at night. It wasn't the biggest annoyance, but something I definitely noticed.

Even though I slept less than I thought, most nights I got a good sleep score—some were even great—but I was still exhausted when the alarm went off in the morning. While the app does have a helpful section for getting better sleep, with programs like pre-bedtime meditation, yoga, and stories, it doesn't exactly narrow down what my problem is.

A sleep tracker could be a helpful step toward better sleep, and the Halo Rise is a good one, but it won't tell you if you have a serious condition like sleep apnea. If you suffer from insomnia, actively tracking sleep can actually make the problem worse. But it can be cool to see what's happening when we are otherwise comatose for eight hours. I thought it was particularly interesting to see how long I'm in each stage of sleep.

Since I've been dealing with exhaustion, going back and forth to my doctor for blood tests and vitamins, this at least crosses sleep off the list. Now I have actual data to show my doctor that I really am sleeping well.